Cool Band Alert - Mohamed Bourouissa

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Name: Mohamed Bourouissa
From: Paris, France
Members: Mohamed Bourouissa
RIYL: Arca, Amnesia Scanner, Lolina, Raime, Ossia
The Gist: Ambient 12-inches left out in the sun until they melt

The debut outing from musician and visual artist Mohamed Bourouissa plays the way memory feels. Its songs are both wavy and slippery, going purposely out of focus just when it seems they’re about to take on a concrete form. There’s some deliberateness in this—each track is named after a specific person Bourouissa was thinking about when he wrote it, and there’s a sense in which the songs reflect the abstract ways we call someone’s face and personality to mind when they’re mentioned. But LILA isn’t just an intellectual exercise. It’s a dazzling work of electronic composition, and the billowy textures of its songs are the result of their precise layers: thick rivers of synth, split-second sliced-up snippets of processed voice, rat-a-tat drums that enter suddenly and leave just as quickly. Sometimes the mood is dark (see: the brooding “JQ”), sometimes it’s bright and hopeful (the almost-pop “MG”). But Bourouissa’s willingness to let sound distend is the defining characteristic. It’s music that refuses to resolve into something fixed, its snakelike shape always slithering free of your grasp.

LILA is out July 24th on PAN. Pre-order it here.

If they’re not already on your radar, you’re sure to enjoy the similarly free-roaming electronic music of The Bug and rRoxymore. The mutant club music released by Halcyon Veil will also be up your alley, as will the moody strain of dance music coming out of Birmingham. And the new generation of artists reviving dubstep are also coloring far outside that genre’s lines, discovering strange new shapes and sounds.

Come hang in the chat with artists celebrating their record release this week on Bandcamp.